Yesterday in a suburban church, a 43-year-old Roman Catholic priest, with one natural daughter somewhere in Latin America and a tendency to drink and drive, refused to administer communion to a 30-year-old man whom he knew to have been baptised into the Church of Ireland.
This morning, the same man telephoned the local parish priest to complain about what happened when he went to church with his Roman Catholic partner. The parish priest backed up his curate, and then explained that the man's partner may not take communion in the Church of Ireland either. In defence, he quoted One Body, One Bread, a pamphlet published by the bishops of these islands five days ago. In fact, the situation outlined above is fictional, and any resemblance to real life entirely coincidental. Most 30-year-old men spend Sundays on entirely different pursuits: nor is the fictional priest a representative character, despite current stereotypes. But under a canon law which allows the separation of the private and the clerical lives of individual priests, it remains possible.
Theology claims to be a discipline set apart from politics, but sometimes the distinction is hard to grasp. Just as fractured communities in Ireland are trying to live the meaning of the phrase "Love your neighbour as yourself", the first principle of Christianity and Roman Catholicism, the Roman Catholic bishops of the two islands choose to issue a public reminder about why such love must remain conditional. And they want to underline it too. Rather than leave well enough alone, they also recommend what amounts to a campaign against inter-community rapprochement. Every parish in Ireland should now spend a period of between four and six weeks "studying and reflecting on One Bread, One Body" - meditating, in other words, on the conflicts between the Anglican and Roman churches at precisely the most testing time in the Northern Ireland peace process.
If local churches, schools and teaching institutions follow this lead, as requested, communities all over the island will ponder their differences, with official encouragement, until at least the middle of November. The prospect is staggering. The Catholic Church may well wonder why anyone else should be interested in what it wants to perceive as an internal matter for its own members. Certainly, other recent statements seem to pave the way for a new kind of global Catholicism which can operate without external questioning. Earlier this year, the Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference more or less expressed that view in its document on "conscience": "How many people, one wonders, at the back of their minds, think something like `Isn't it well for people who are not Catholics; they don't have to worry about all these rules?' "There is something puzzling about such an attitude," the document continued. "If people think that what the Church says is false, why does it concern them at all? If they think it is true, surely they cannot think that it is better not to know the truth!"
The argument is superficially compelling. What if the Church were to be exempt from scrutiny or criticism in the public discourse, except for favourable remarks? Then it could market itself to a new kind of Catholic, one who obeys most of the rules all of the time. That person would increasingly be found in Third rather than First World countries, which in turn would enable the church take stock of its undoubted difficulties in ministering to increasingly wealthy, urban, First World pluralist cultures where survival is not a matter of life and death but of negotiating the times in between. Within its own discourse, the church has already developed systems of controlling levels of dissent, with sanctions raging from silencing to excommunication, as is its right. That makes the Catholic Church on these islands infinitely more protected already than are its colleagues in the Anglican communion, whose ranks are heaving with the impact of no-holds-barred debates on women priests, gay clergy and homosexual marriages.
Yet the argument is disingenuous too. The "what if" of theology comes a poor second to those "how to" questions which disrupt the hum of everyday life. What if you are a Roman Catholic on a mission to China and you cannot find a Catholic priest? Then under the sole excepted criterion of "grave and pressing need" you can take communion if a priest from the Eastern Churches happens to be on hand. But how to live in a post-Belfast Agreement society where "grave and pressing need" is both more immediate and tougher to spot? Already, the church is starting to market itself as a haven for "heroes", who can cope with the "demanding" lifestyle required by the keepers of the faith.
"The word `absolutist' may sound unattractive," the "conscience" document explains, "but in some circumstances it can be another word for `hero'. " But the age of the hero has passed. If, as The Stranglers sang, there are no more heroes any more, the search to create a new breed is at best unwise and at worst dangerous, especially in Ireland.
At a time when the early-morning gym has replaced seven o'clock Mass and the mobile phone a well-fingered set of rosary beads, the bishops' surprising insensitivity in promoting a debate on the limitations of inter-community rapprochement may not seem remarkable. It is, after all, a logical consequence of the position already asserted when the President sparked off the debate late last year at Christ Church Cathedral.
But it is not in the public interest to focus on the matter over the next few months. Thus, whatever the findings of theology, it is a matter for public discussion that the bishops have chosen so delicate a time in the history of relations between the two islands, and between the Christian communities on this island, to go public. And that so far, the Irish bishops have issued no instructions to delay the educational campaign arising from it.
If any single action marks the final separation of Church and State in Ireland, it is the publication of One Bread, One Body. Using their own word, they have fallen into the trap of "indifferentism": this single statement by senior church leaders has unwittingly ignored the massive moral challenges of the contemporary state, and in so doing, may well undercut the contributions of less powerful conferences such as CORI and the Vincent de Paul, whose focus on an equality agenda has made its faith of direct relevance to the public discourse.
Rather than believe it an act of monumental arrogance, it may be more comforting to read the decision to publish One Bread, One Body as a sign of how inured the bishops have become to playing a merely walk-on role in the drama of contemporary Ireland and Irishness. They have, perhaps, forgotten that when they speak, the whole community is willing to listen, and to take seriously what they say. Or once was.